Who Are You My Son? On Toledot

On the guises we wear to be loved and the scent no one can borrow

My mother always knew my father was home by the way he shut the car door. Şakir, our driver, used the same car and could just as easily have been the one closing it, and yet the moment she heard that sound she would say, there he is, my love. Without seeing his face, without hearing his voice. Just a door closing. As a child I took it for a habit. Thinking about it now, I understand how deep a love it takes to know someone by a small gesture repeated every day, and not by their role or title or the guise they wear.

Toledot shows us a family that lives the very opposite. Inside one tent everyone loves everyone and no one really knows anyone. The heaviest question in the parasha rises from that tent. Yitzhak, whose eyes no longer see, turns to the son standing in front of him and asks mi ata beni. Who are you, my son?

After reading that question I went back through the parasha and found a guise everywhere I looked. Esav asks his father how one tithes salt and straw. According to Rashi he knows perfectly well that they need no tithing, and asks only so his father will think him meticulous. The Torah tells us why Yitzhak loved him, ki tzayid befiv, because there was game in his mouth. Here is a son who brings game to his father’s table and pious questions to his father’s ear. At forty he marries Hittite women, because his father had married at forty. Rashi brings the image of the pig that lies down and stretches out its split hooves as if to say, look, I am clean. Esav spends his whole life wearing the guise of the son his father wants to see.

Yitzhak wears his own. When famine drives him to Gerar he does exactly what his father Avraham did years before and calls his wife his sister. He has inherited the fear along with everything else. One day the king looks out of a window and sees Yitzhak metzachek with Rivka, laughing and playing with her. Metzachek comes from the same root as Yitzhak’s name, to laugh. He is caught in the very moment he is living out his own name, and it is a stranger who sees the truth.

Rivka is hiding something too. When the children were crushing each other inside her she had asked im ken lama ze anochi, if so, why am I here at all, gone to inquire of HaShem, and been told that the elder would serve the younger. Nowhere does the Torah say she told Yitzhak. Years later, when Yitzhak decides to bless Esav, he says nothing to Rivka either. She hears it from behind the door. The Torah describes her with a single word, shoma’at. She was listening.

In the end a guise is put on Yaakov. Rivka dresses him in Esav’s finest clothes, the ones kept in the house. According to Rashi, Esav himself had once coveted those garments from Nimrod the hunter. Goatskins are wrapped around his hands and his neck. Yaakov is afraid. If my father touches me, he says, I will bring a curse on myself. Rivka answers alai kilelatcha beni, let your curse be on me, my son. A mother’s love steps forward with her whole body, and in the same breath wraps her son in someone else’s skin.

This is what I see most often in relationships. People put on a guise to be loved. They bring what the other person likes, ask the questions the other wants to hear, marry at the age the other expects. And the love flows into the guise. Then one day one of them asks the other, who are you, and finds no answer. Until each person is willing to be who they are and stop playing a part, no real meeting happens between them. Yitzhak’s failing eyes seem to me a picture of the whole tent going blind. Among the reasons Rashi gives for his blindness is the smoke of the incense Esav’s wives burned to their idols.

Then the scene arrives, and Yitzhak tries to recognize his son with the senses he has left. First he listens. How did you find it so quickly? Yaakov answers, HaShem your God sent it my way. Rashi says this is exactly where Yitzhak grows suspicious, because Esav rarely spoke the name of HaShem. The voice is telling the truth. Then Yitzhak says come close, my son, so I can feel you, and speaks the line everyone knows. Hakol kol Yaakov vehayadayim yedei Esav. The voice is the voice of Yaakov and the hands are the hands of Esav. My father taught me to trust people whose words and actions match. Yitzhak notices that the voice and the hands do not match, and he believes the hands.

Then comes the scent. As Yitzhak kisses his son he breathes it in. Re’eh re’ach beni kere’ach sadeh asher beracho HaShem. See, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that HaShem has blessed. Rashi reminds us that goatskins would have smelled foul, and brings a Midrash. The fragrance of Gan Eden came in with Yaakov. In Hebrew, scent is re’ach and spirit is ruach, and Hebrew dictionaries trace both to the same root, breath, a stirring of air. The Talmud asks what it is that the soul enjoys and the body does not, and answers that it is fragrance. Esav’s clothes could be put on, the goatskin could be wrapped around. The fragrance of Gan Eden could not be borrowed. Yaakov carried it himself. This is how I read the scene. Yitzhak’s hands were fooled by the guise, and his soul recognized what lay beneath it. The Torah does not say this. It is what I take from that moment.

In Kabbalah, Avraham is bound to Chesed, Yitzhak to Gevurah and Yaakov to Tiferet. Gevurah is the power that measures, weighs and passes judgment, and in this scene it is Yitzhak’s judging hand that errs. Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech Spira, the author of the Bnei Yissaschar, adds something about scent. In Bereshit, Chava looks at the tree, takes the fruit and eats, and she has already listened to the serpent. In his view, smell is the one sense that had no part in that sin, and so it never lost its bond with Gan Eden. Seen this way, it means even more that what Yitzhak caught on Yaakov was the fragrance of Gan Eden. The Talmud discusses a verse in Yeshayahu about the Mashiach, that he will not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear. From the word vaharicho, Rava learns that the Mashiach will judge by smell. In place of a judgment that errs through the eyes, the ears and the hands, a judgment that finds the truth through scent. That is why it moves me so deeply that Yitzhak, the man of Gevurah, leaned on scent last of all that day. This too is my own reading.

I think of my mother and the car door again. That sound could not be borrowed either.

There is another man in this parasha who cannot see what lies beneath. One evening Esav comes in from the field exhausted and sees something red in Yaakov’s pot. Hal’iteni na min ha’adom ha’adom hazeh. Give me some of that red, that red there. According to Rashi, Avraham had died that day, and the red lentils were a meal of mourning. Esav cannot see his grandfather’s death, only the color. He gives his birthright for that bowl, and the Torah closes the scene with a single verb, vayivez. He despised it.

Yitzhak, by contrast, is a man who spends his life searching for what lies under the ground. The Philistines had stopped up his father Avraham’s wells with earth. Yitzhak opens them again one by one and gives them back the names his father gave them. A well in Hebrew is be’er, באר, and to create is bara, ברא. The two are written with the same three letters, though their roots and meanings are separate and there is no linguistic bond between them. It is simply a play of letters that caught my eye. Over the new wells he digs, first comes Esek, contention, and then Sitna, enmity. Over the third no one quarrels, and Yitzhak calls it Rehovot, wide space. In Be’er Sheva HaShem tells him, do not be afraid, I am with you. It astonishes me every time that this man, who could find water under the earth, could not find his own son under a guise in his own tent.

When Esav returns from the hunt, everything comes to light. Yitzhak trembles so violently that Rashi says he saw Gehinnom open beneath his feet. Even so, he does not take the blessing back. He too will be blessed, he says. And then Esav’s cry. Father, do you have only one blessing? Bless me too, my father. Reading that cry, I cannot be angry with Esav. A man who spent his whole life in the guise his father loved learns that day that the guise was never who he was. Yitzhak gives him a blessing too. He will live by his sword, he will serve his brother, and one day he will throw that yoke from his neck.

Esav resolves in his heart to kill his brother. According to Rashi, Rivka learns of it without anyone telling her, through divine inspiration, and sends Yaakov away to Haran. Why should I lose you both in one day, she says. To Yitzhak she gives a different reason, that she is weary of the Hittite women.

This time Yitzhak blesses Yaakov without any guise. VeEl Shaddai yevarech otcha. May El Shaddai bless you and give you the blessing of Avraham. No borrowed clothes and no goatskin. Yaakov stands before his father under his own name and receives the blessing in his own name. Rashi links the name Shaddai to the word dai, enough.

I try to love every person as though the love I give them were given to HaShem. When we love only someone’s guise, we turn that guise into an idol without realizing it. When the guise changes, the love scatters. To love the scent a person carries inside, that spirit, takes us beyond the guise.

At the end of the parasha the Torah names Rivka once more as em Yaakov ve’Esav, the mother of Yaakov and Esav. Rashi writes a brief note beside the line. Eini yodea mah melamdenu. I do not know what this teaches us. The man who wrote all those commentaries says here that he does not know. Esav, seeing that his father is displeased with the Canaanite women, goes to Yishmael and marries his daughter Machalat. The parasha ends there, with Esav still looking for a way to please his father.

Sources

1. Bereshit 25:19 through 28:9, Parashat Toldot. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.25.19
2. Bereshit 25:22 and 25:23, Rivka’s question and the answer she receives.
3. Bereshit 25:28 and Rashi, ki tzayid befiv, tithing salt and straw. https://dovbear.blogspot.com/2007/11/salt-and-straw.html
4. Bereshit 25:29 through 25:34, Rashi on 25:30, and Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 16b, the day Avraham died and the meal of mourning. https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Batra.16b
5. Bereshit 12:13 and 20:2, Avraham calls his wife his sister. Bereshit 26:7 and 26:8, Yitzhak and metzachek. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.26.8
6. Bereshit 26:15 through 26:25, the wells, Esek, Sitna, Rehovot and Be’er Sheva. Bereshit 1:1, bara. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.26.18
7. Bereshit 26:34 and Rashi, the image of the pig. https://www.outorah.org/p/239501
8. Bereshit 27:1 and Rashi, Yitzhak’s eyes grow dim. https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/8222/showrashi/true
9. Bereshit 27:5, shoma’at. Bereshit 27:13, alai kilelatcha beni.
10. Bereshit 27:15 and Rashi, the garments Esav took from Nimrod. https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/8222/showrashi/true
11. Bereshit 27:18, mi ata beni. Bereshit 27:20 and 27:21 with Rashi, Yitzhak’s suspicion. https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/8222/showrashi/true
12. Bereshit 27:22, hakol kol Yaakov vehayadayim yedei Esav.
13. Bereshit 27:27 and Rashi, the smell of the field and Gan Eden. https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/8222/showrashi/true
14. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 43b, the fragrance the soul enjoys. https://www.sefaria.org/Berakhot.43b
15. The shared root of re’ach and ruach, Brown, Driver and Briggs Hebrew Lexicon. https://biblehub.com/hebrew/7381.htm
16. Bereshit 27:33 and Rashi, Yitzhak trembles. Bereshit 27:34 through 27:40, Esav’s cry and his blessing. https://www.chabad.org/parshah/torahreading_cdo/aid/9172/p/6
17. Bereshit 27:41 through 27:46, Rashi on 27:42 and 27:45, Rivka learns of Esav’s plan. https://widetorah.com/genesis/27/42
18. Bereshit 28:3 and 28:4 with Rashi, El Shaddai and dai. https://widetorah.com/genesis/28/3/
19. Bereshit 28:5 and Rashi, eini yodea mah melamdenu. https://oztorah.com/?p=763
20. Bereshit 28:9, Esav and Machalat. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.28.9
21. Zohar, Vayetze 150a, Avraham as Chesed, Yitzhak as Gevurah, Yaakov as Tiferet. https://www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/379343/jewish/Ladder-With-No-Snakes.htm
22. Bnei Yissaschar, smell as the sense untouched by the sin. https://outorah.org/p/38472
23. Bereshit 3:6, Chava and the tree.
24. Yeshayahu 11:3 and Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 93b, judging by smell. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/sanhedrin-93/